"The Jewish people as a whole will be its own Messiah. It will attain world domination by the dissolution of other races...and by the establishment of a world republic in which everywhere the Jews will exercise the privilege of citizenship. In this New World Order the Children of Israel...will furnish all the leaders without encountering opposition..." (Karl Marx in a letter to Baruch Levy, quoted in Review de Paris, June 1, 1928, p. 574)

Monday, 6 May 2013

Red lines and red herrings

.

By Daryl G. Press, Jennifer Lind

With reports of chemical weapons use in Syria,
many U.S. officials and foreign policy analysts have called for U.S. military
intervention there. They quote President Obama's previous statements referring
to chemical weapons use as an unacceptable crossing of a "red line." This is
unsurprising: Every time analysts and leaders call for war, they warn that inaction
will jeopardize America's credibility. What is more surprising, however, is how
little evidence there is for this view.

What has actually transpired in Syria remains
unclear (especially with a new claim that Syria rebels may have used nerve gas), but the possibility that Syria crossed the administration's "red
line" has brought calls for U.S. military action. "The
credibility of the United States is on the line," declared Senators
John McCain and Lindsey Graham, "not just with Syria, but with
Iran, North Korea, and all of our enemies and friends who are watching closely
to see whether the president backs up his words with action." (Many others have
made similar arguments, for example here and here.)

To be sure, for a country like the United States -- which
seeks to assure allies and deter adversaries around the globe -- credibility is
a precious asset. Credibility -- the belief held by others that a country will carry out its threats and promises --
is the difference between deterring attacks and having to wage war to repel
them.
But how do countries build credibility? Those who favor
intervention in Syria assert that credibility comes from having a reputation
for keeping commitments. The "smoking gun" evidence for this view can allegedly
be found in a 1939 speech in which Adolf Hitler explained to his generals why
he felt emboldened to invade Poland. He
dismissed French and British threats, mocking them for their concessions at the
Munich Conference: "Our enemies are worms," he scoffed, "I
saw them at Munich."

Hitler's quote, and the so-called
"Munich Analogy," has come to embody the danger of breaking commitments and
featured prominently in U.S. decisions to defend South Korea in 1950 and later
to fight (and stay) in Vietnam. Since then, the fear of losing credibility
helped propel the United States into conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and
Libya.

The problem is that there's little evidence
that supports the view that countries' record for keeping commitments
determines their credibility. Jonathan Mercer, in his book Reputation
and International Politics, examined a series of crises leading
up to World War I and found that backing down did not cause one's adversaries
to discount one's credibility.

In
another book, Daryl Press examined a series of Cold War crises between NATO
and the Warsaw Pact. From 1958 to 1961, Nikita Khrushchev repeatedly threatened
to cut off NATO's access to West Berlin. Each time, the deadlines passed and
Khrushchev failed to carry out his threats.

If backing down damages credibility, Khrushchev's
credibility should have been plummeting, but the deliberations of American and
British leaders show that his credibility steadily grew throughout this period.
And a year after the 1961 Berlin confrontation, when the same American decision-makers
confronted Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they took his threats
very seriously. Senior U.S. leaders were convinced that Khrushchev would
respond to any forceful U.S. act against Cuba with an immediate Soviet attack
against Berlin. Four years of backing down had not damaged Soviet credibility
in the least.
Documents from American and British archives reveal that
when NATO leaders tried to assess the credibility of Soviet threats, they didn't
focus on the past. Instead, they looked at
Khrushchev's current threat and the current circumstances and asked
themselves two simple questions. Can he do it? And would it serve his
interests?

In the eyes of the Macmillan, Eisenhower, and Kennedy
governments, Soviet credibility was growing -- despite Khrushchev's bluster -- simply
because Soviet power was expanding. Power and interests in the here-and-now determine credibility, not what
one did in different circumstances in the past.

Even the canonical case for reputational arguments --
Hitler's dismissal of French and British threats in 1939 -- shows that credibility
stems from power and interests. When Hitler told his generals why the British
and French would not oppose him when he invaded Poland, he listed seven reasons,
every
one of which was about the balance of power. The "worms" quote was a throwaway line after
a detailed analysis of the balance of military power and Poland's
indefensibility.

Advocates of intervention in Syria
worry that a failure to act will embolden U.S. adversaries around the world.
But if Kim Jong Un is trying to figure out whether or not the United States
would defend South Korea, he will notice that Washington and Seoul have been
allies for more than six decades, and that with the rise of China, the United
States is increasing its focus on East Asia.
The notion that Kim would interpret U.S. reluctance to stop a
humanitarian disaster in Syria as a green light to conquer a major U.S. ally
strains credulity.

Similarly, leaders in Tehran assessing
U.S. threats to strike their nuclear facilities will weigh America's clear
interest in nuclear nonproliferation against the real limitations of airstrikes
against Iran's deeply buried nuclear facilities. American reluctance to support various
extremist rebels in Syria is unlikely to enter into Iran's calculus.

As the civil war in Syria unfolds, the
United States may eventually decide to intervene. U.S. officials and foreign
policy analysts might make the case (which we disagree with) to join the
fighting in order to stop the humanitarian disaster, to contain regional
instability, or to secure U.S. influence with the post-Assad Syrian government.
But the case for U.S. military
intervention should not rest on a bogus theory about signaling resolve to Khamenei
and Kim. American credibility lies elsewhere.

Daryl G. Press
is an associate professor in the Government Department at Dartmouth
College and coordinator of War and Peace Studies at Dartmouth’s John
Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. Jennifer Lind is an associate professor in the Government Department at Dartmouth College and the author of Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics. Follow her on Twitter @profLind.

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